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Technology and tools to drive engagement and revenue

Social Media: OpenFuego

Use: Curate Twitter conversations on topics of interest to your users or advertisers

OpenFuego is the new open-source version of Fuego, a tool created by the Nieman Journalism Lab to automatically monitor Twitter feeds and curate conversations based on designated topics.

Here is how the tool author, Andrew Phelps, describes the process: “You create a database and follow the instructions in the config file….Choose a group of authorities — the Twitter users who will seed the universe you want to track. ….After you identify these 10 authorities, OpenFuego does the rest. The app follows them on Twitter, as well as all of the people they follow, up to a total of 5,000 sources. When one of those sources shares a link, the link is scored according to the source’s influence. Influence is determined by the number of authorities who follow that source.”

The tool provides the back-end curation. Publishers will have to create their own tool to display the content on the Web page.

Publishers can use the tool to supplement or provide background information on designated topics. That information can be solely a tool for journalists or can be packaged online for users. The tool could also be used to find “friendly” references to particular brands that can be added to the toolkit of advertiser services.